Critter pics / Pet Thread: Dial Up Beware

This is a discussion on Critter pics / Pet Thread: Dial Up Beware within the Off Topic & Humor Discussion forums, part of the The Back Porch category; Well, I guess I better join the crowd. This is Matilda, a stray I rescued about a year ago....

I'm gonna resurrect my own old thread ....... had a dragonfly around pond earlier. Sucker didn't land and stay still for long but got a few pics - here are a couple. Dang, but it's hot out today!

I had one similar to that land on the tomato stakes in the garden. I didn't have my camera but I watched it check it's six a few times then dart up 12 inches to grab a gnat and land back down in a fraction of a second. One of the coolest things I've seen in a while.

Camera is a Minolta DiMAGE A1. It is used on auto for these altho I can manually set anything. Main prob usually is autofocus gets ''fooled'' by other items and so hard to get that set. Sometimes use manual focus but with intense sunlight that doesn't help much with screen being hard to read.

The lens is optical 7:1 zoom which I use at full tele - it also has an option for macro too at full wide and tele but for these shots I rely on just full tele and try and creep in closer while taking a sequence. With macro on, I can get in much closer but with birds and bugs that would usually spook them.

I take full size pics at 2560 x 1920 and then this gives me an option to crop out the main subject and still have a useable size end result. Some patience involved plus - luck too

I use tripod whenever possible, mainly tho for static stuff like guns where I use artificial lighting and manual settings.

For bugs - subjects that rarely cooperate much! .......... I rely on auto and hand held. I have the ability to + or - the auto exposure by 1/3 stop increments - that is useful sometimes. Rest of final work is processing the image properties on the puter.

This dragonfly followed a sorta random pattern .. flying for a bit around and over pond, and then settling on either the top of a lily stem or, upper part of a Spirea (spl) bush. Much of time, wherever I was waiting and sweating .. it went to the other spot!!

Liberty is an inherently offensive lifestyle. Living in a free society guarantees that each one of us will see our most cherished principles and beliefs questioned and in some cases mocked. It's worth it.

"He went on two legs, wore clothes and was a human being, but nevertheless he was in reality a wolf of the Steppes. He had learned a good deal . . . and was a fairly clever fellow. What he had not learned, however, was this: to find contentment in himself and his own life. The cause of this apparently was that at the bottom of his heart he knew all the time (or thought he knew) that he was in reality not a man, but a wolf of the Steppes."